вівторок, 29 березня 2011 р.

whiteboard distribution

Having a team of 3 persons currently working on a project from 2 different locations we are using DropBox service heavily for all our images exchange (with source codes stored in SVN). Although there are a lot of free online sketching tools in the market, we opt for a standard office whiteboard you can find in any shop out there. It does cost some money but speeds up drawing and discussion just around it a lot! A single problem with the whiteboard is that you cannot save its state with a single mouse click. The easiest solution for this we found using DropBox iPhone App - 4 taps and the current whiteboard status is saved to the DropBox folder shared to all the team members.

Now the only problems you might face - no version control, if you file system doesn't support it, as well as some non-frequent bugs and lags of the service. No software is ideal unfortunately.

3 коментарі:

Anton Babenko сказав...

My 5 cents :) I used Balsamiq+Jira to make sketches and share them with the team, and it worked very nicely when I had structured data (like bugs/tasks/milestones). Though, I found more efficient way to share any kind of data using google docs (there is real-time editing, btw) and using Axure to develop wireframes (or other graphics, which is usually on whiteboards).

Kostiantyn Sokolinskyi сказав...

We use google docs a lot for storing some links and statistics info in Spreadsheets. I've heard they introduced kind of a sketching in google docs some time ago but haven't tried by now.

We have a Track in our hands but unfortunately I failed to introduce it project-wide. Probably, after the first release we will start using it for storing found bugs/issues and development plans.

White board is extremely useful for drawings when you try to quickly explain how something e.g. animation should be programmed.

I think I should give a look to Axure.

Anton Babenko сказав...

Trac - suxx, Jira+Greenhopper - 20$ per year and unlimited features for a small team like your, I would say :) I know that the good way of sharing links between team-members is delicious.com, where you can make private bookmarks visible just for your team, though I would use xmarks plugin to share links+passwords in all browsers with all team members (there are profiles, so you don't have to share your private sensitive data with other team-members).